MADNESS, AT ITS BEST

MADNESS, AT ITS BEST

Madness, at its best. Should I name a star

after you that rises in the west and sets in the east

and later gouge its eyes out like a cartouche

on an obelisk I erected when you were

the queen of heaven, and I was pointed

in the right direction, make a course correction

and say the compass lied? Things just

reverse spin sometimes. The moon

gets stuck in your throat like your last thin dime

in a telephone booth, and everything you feel

is long distance after that, a soothsayer

parsing aorist oracles in his sleep, as he grinds his teeth.

Would you understand, would you know

what it means to enshrine what you’ve laboured

to love the longest in the ore of meteoric metaphors

with nickel-iron swords at the core of the rock

I keep pulling out and falling upon

like the significant absurdity of a peasant king

who refuses to sit on any throne he can’t abdicate

on a whim. I want to wing it on the wind

like a maple key, or the silhouette of a crow

in the locket of the moon. But know this,

consider this wisely as a starmap on a lake,

crazy as I am not to care what I sound like

when the stars confide what’s in their hearts

to the leaves of the silver Russian olives,

there’s a magnificent abyss without a view

of anyone when you come before them

like a lover’s ledge no one’s ever lept from

precipitously enough for you to believe

the inconceivable has fallen in love with you

like a discontinued theme song that never

made a big hit on the bottom you’ve been reaching for

like the bedrock of a water palace whose depths

are way over your head like a waterclock

you weren’t counting like a lover to show up on time

at your door. Can you hear my words ticking by

as if they were sword- dancing with their own shadows

like galaxies and sundials, Sufis and Buddhas

comparing mirages at a crossroads in the desert

and laughing because so much is missing

from the message they have to humour the medium

into making a surprise appearance at her own seance.

The underage magician is pulling doves and crows

from behind your ears and releasing them

from your privatized aviary like voices

breaking their parole like a love song they’ve

been singing too long in the choir of a false dawn

at a sky burial for lapwings on a pyre of crutches

that weren’t even real, that never got the feel

of spreading their feathers out on the lake

like wild swans getting ready to take off in the moonlight

with no cause for alarm among the stars

they leave in their wake like the Milky Way

rising over the horizon of the flightpath they’re on

like a catalpa tree in the spring, or a road of ghosts

beyond the gateways of the starfields in the autumn,

a scar of light on the wounded waters of life

that heal themselves like eyes that have cried enough

to return like the rivers of paradise

through the burning gates of Eden as if, water

only once, but you get to jump through the same fire twice.

PATRICK WHITE